Alliance Trust Savings

Alliance Trust Savings required a partner to provide secure colocation and managed cloud services to help them kick-start their journey to the cloud as part of a business-wide digital transformation project.

If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, you have to make sure that basket is rock-solid; moving to Brightsolid is the best thing we have ever done. Alan McCormick, Head of IT Infrastructure

Alliance Trust Savings, a subsidiary of Alliance Trust plc, is a market-leading and award-winning savings and investment organisation, headquartered in Dundee.

As a growing business, Alliance Trust Savings recognises that technology can be a core enabler. In 2010, as part of a business-wide digital transformation project, they embarked on a journey towards cloud computing to allow them to realise the many benefits it can deliver, such as cost savings, flexibility and organisational agility.

Their next step was to appoint a secure colocation and managed cloud provider to kick-start their journey to the cloud. The intent was to relocate their critical infrastructure to be hosted securely off-site, which would then allow the internal technology teams to focus on more high-value internal activities.

After reviewing the market, Alliance Trust Savings decided the right partner to deliver these critical hosting services was Brightsolid. This marked a further chapter in the strong relationship between the two Dundee-based companies and a further commitment to the ongoing development and prosperity of the city of Dundee.

With collaboration dating back to 1888, both organisations and their parent companies, DC Thomson and Alliance Trust, have been forerunners in investing in Dundee as a centre of intellectual progress, innovation and profitability.

Alliance Trust Savings were an early technology innovator and quickly realised that they could achieve economic, performance and security benefits in using a managed cloud provider like Brightsolid, even before the term ‘cloud’ became as ubiquitous as it is today. They knew what they wanted to achieve and had very clear requirements for ongoing success.

Reliability and resilience were of paramount importance, given the value and business criticality of the data in question. Alliance Trust Savings manages more than £16billion of assets for over 100,000 customer accounts, all of which are hosted in the Brightsolid Dundee data centre.

Alan McCormick, Head of IT Infrastructure at Alliance Trust Savings, said: “As a financial services organisation, we need total reliability. Our customers depend on it, and us. With Brightsolid, we experience almost 100% uptime”.

As a heavily-regulated business, safety and security were also very important requirements for Alliance Trust Savings. It is vital they can demonstrate appropriate levels of security. Brightsolid’s multi-layered security options tick this box. Alan said: “Working with Brightsolid has taken our worries away; we could spend ten times more time effort and money to get a fraction of the security and resiliency we experience with Brightsolid.”

In addition to providing hosting for the Alliance Trust Savings critical infrastructure, Brightsolid also provide complementary hosting services, using its highly skilled and qualified staff and engineers in its Dundee data centre. These include managed hands services, 24×7 monitoring and alerting, service management support, account management and more.

Brightsolid have also focused on building strong relationships between their team and Alliance Trust Savings to ensure great ongoing levels of client satisfaction. This holistic managed service approach has freed the IT team at Alliance Trust Savings to focus on strategic technology initiatives, but with reassurance that their customers’ data is in very safe hands.

Alan said; “If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, you have to make sure that basket is rock-solid; moving to Brightsolid is the best thing we have ever done”

The long-term partnership between Alliance Trust Savings and Brightsolid continues to go from strength to strength. Alliance Trust Savings are continuing their digital transformation and cloud journey, and are exploring new ways of working with Brightsolid and its end-to-end cloud solutions portfolio.

“Like Alliance Trust Savings, Brightsolid is a continually evolving organisation; we have been excited to see how they are growing and evolving to continue to meet our needs now and in the future”, said Alan.